Dom Corvaisis and Brendan Cronin’s telekinetic demonstration goes out of control

The telekinetic demonstration at the Tranquility Grille turns an experiment into a crisis: Dom Corvaisis and Brendan Cronin discover that they can lift objects without touching them, but cannot reliably control what their shared power sets in motion. What begins with two small glass shakers ends with chairs smashing against the ceiling, a light fixture crashing down, and the room’s celebratory curiosity replaced by fear. The demonstration confirms their abilities while exposing their danger—and the distance those abilities may place between them and everyone else.

The Test and Its Stakes

Dom and Brendan sit alone at opposite ends of the long table, while the seven adults, including Jorja Monatella, form a semicircle a few paces away to give them room to concentrate. Jorja’s daughter, Marcie Monatella, is asleep in a booth. In front of Dom stands a salt shaker; before Brendan is a pepper shaker. Ginger Weiss has proposed the test: each man is to try to move his shaker without touching it.

For Dom, the possibility of success is not straightforwardly welcome. He remembers spending most of his thirty-five years shy and ineffectual, then enjoying fifteen months of greater ease before his sleepwalking began the previous October. He fears that proof of psychic powers will end that brief normality and isolate him again—this time because others see him as superior, rather than because he sees himself as inferior. He hopes the test will fail.

Brendan’s hopes pull in another direction. Though he has denied that God is behind the miraculous cures and apparitional lights, Dom senses that the priest wants to find a divine Presence at work and to be drawn back toward his faith and the Church. Ginger’s suggestion that their abilities might instead have been conferred by a germ makes the test spiritually consequential for Brendan as well as personally startling. The two men approach the shakers with different longings, but neither knows what the experiment will establish.

The First Levitation

At first, Dom’s shaker remains still. He thinks through the fact that matter is never entirely motionless: the glass is made of atoms already in ceaseless movement. As he becomes absorbed in the object, he forgets the watching group. Then he feels a sudden buoyancy, and the shaker rises—not by an inch or two along the tabletop, but vertically into the air. It climbs to four feet above the table and hangs there, above the eye level of the standing onlookers.

Brendan’s pepper shaker rises too, stopping at precisely the same height. He stares at it in amazement and fear, briefly looks away, and finds that the object stays aloft without his gaze. Dom is equally unsettled by how little conscious effort the act requires: he does not feel power surging through him or a deliberate grip on the shaker. The ability seems to work automatically, like breathing or a heartbeat. As Brendan raises his hands, the red rings on his palms reappear, an observable recurrence alongside the levitation.

At Ginger’s urging to try something else, the demonstration spreads beyond the original pair. Six, eight, then ten additional salt shakers lift from tables elsewhere in the room; matching pepper shakers follow, and the objects begin to spin. Dom makes no separate effort for each new movement. He finds that thought seems simply to become fact, while suspecting Brendan is just as unable to explain how it is happening.

From Wonder to Panic

The spectacle grows into a circuit of all eleven sets of salt and pepper shakers: the paired halves orbit one another as the sets move around the room faster and faster, catching and scattering light. The room’s wonder turns abruptly into danger when twelve chairs shoot violently up to the ceiling. Two strike a wagon-wheel lighting fixture, bursting its bulbs; the fixture tears loose from its brackets and wires and crashes to the floor behind Dom. The chairs rattle overhead while shakers continue to whirl, and some objects begin to fall. One shaker hits Ernie Block’s shoulder and hurts him.

Dom and Brendan have lost control, and neither knows how to recover it because neither understood how control began. The onlookers scramble beneath tables, recognizing the suspended chairs as the more dangerous threat. The crash wakes Marcie, who cries for her mother; Jorja pulls her from the booth and shelters with her under a table. The crowd gets out of the objects’ path, but Dom and Brendan remain exposed. To Dom, the power now feels like a live grenade wired to his hand.

The danger becomes physical and specific: the chairs gouge chunks from the ceiling, and a falling salt shaker strikes the table in front of Dom hard enough to crack into several pieces, scattering salt. Remembering the spinning paper moons in Zebediah Lomack’s house six days earlier, Dom raises both hands toward the chairs and shakers, closes his fists so that his Palm-Ring Stigmata are out of sight, and orders the objects to stop. The chairs cease vibrating; the shakers halt in midair. After a short, unnatural silence, all twelve chairs and the remaining shakers drop, bouncing off tables and other furniture before settling into tangled wreckage.

Aftermath and Significance

Neither Dom nor Brendan is injured. Ernie is still massaging his shoulder, but is not seriously hurt; no one else has been injured, though the room is shaken. The fallen fixture leaves live wires dangling, while broken chairs and debris make the consequences of the uncontrolled display impossible to mistake. Marcie’s whimpering and Jorja’s quiet reassurance break the longer silence after the objects fall, and the others emerge from their shelter.

Dom recognizes wariness in the way the group looks at him and Brendan—the response he had feared if the test proved he possessed the power. Ginger is the exception: she embraces him enthusiastically and treats the discovery as hopeful, insisting that he has the ability and may eventually learn to use it. Dom cannot share her confidence without qualification. He points to the wrecked furniture and explains that he did not know how he was producing the movements or how to stop them once they ran wild.

The scene’s reversal is therefore not simply from doubt to proof. A small, almost ordinary object becomes conspicuous and dangerous: the shaker first appears immovable, then floats beyond the men’s conscious command, and finally breaks against the table. The power also changes the social arrangement of the room. The adults initially give Dom and Brendan space to demonstrate; when that demonstration becomes hazardous, they take shelter while the two men remain at its center. Their shared ability creates a bond between them, but its uncontrolled force produces the very separation Dom feared. The demonstration establishes both the wonder of their telekinesis and the urgent problem of living with a power that can act before its bearers understand how to direct it.